Spiritualized – review

Saturday 24 March 2012 20.05 EDT
First published on Saturday 24 March 2012 20.05 EDT

It's a bit of a caricature, but in the world of art, there are two types of practitioners: first, the artist who leaps from one subject to another, mixing media, restlessly looking for the next new thing. Then there are those who fixate on a theme and nag away at it over the years, honing and then endlessly polishing. No surprises which camp Jason Pierce would belong to – a veritable Freud or Rothko to the Hockney or Picasso of peers like Damon Albarn. Overselling him? Only if you think that the project on which he's been embarked ever since his first records as part of Spacemen 3 (from 1986's Sound of Confusion onwards) can't be conceived as a majestic conceptual construct: nothing less than a distillation of the very finest elements of rock'n'roll and more besides.

Now, this might be a problem if no one could agree on what constitutes those elements: if Pierce suddenly threw a bit of Steps into the mix or subscribed to the view that bands such as Kasabian and Coldplay aren't, frankly, shit. But thankfully, that's not the case, or at least, with this reviewer, there seems to be common ground.

After this gig in support of Spiritualized's new album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (a very them title), I looked back at my reporter's notebook to find the following references scribbled down: Can, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Beach Boys circa Smile, Subway Sect, Johnnie Ray, Low-era Bowie, Hendrix's "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)", Dr John, John Coltrane, Sly Stone and the Velvet Underground, of course. Buried deep in the DNA of "Hey Jane", which started proceedings and also kicks off the new album, there are surely traces of Chuck Berry, too.

So Pierce has nothing if not impeccable taste, and the staging for the evening was cool as well: dressed head to toe in white (plus shades), he was joined by two similarly attired gospel backing singers, with an expanse of floor space between them and the rest of the band. Projected on to the screen at the back were all sorts of trippy visuals – occasion once more to bring out the notepad: "Max's Kansas City!" – or sometimes washes of pure colour and light.

The set was drawn from the course of the band's career, with the exception of their debut, Lazer Guided Melodies, released 20 years ago. This meant oscillating between Sweet Heart Sweet Light and 2003's Amazing Grace, and then between that album and 1995's Pure Phase – but anyone coming fresh to this music would have found it hard to discern great stylistic switches. At the end came "The Twelve Steps", from 2001's Let it Come Down, and a closing brace of 1997's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space's "Electricity"and an epic "Cop Shoot Cop".

That last number borrows its key lines about "a hole in my arm where all the money goes/ Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose" from John Prine's 1971 classic song about heroin addiction, "Sam Stone": further evidence that Pierce has always listened to the good stuff. And then throughout there are the oh so familiar references to more druggy business and lots about Jesus and the Lord.

This could all be a problem and, indeed, even the keenest Spiritualized fan must sometimes feel as if it's all nothing more than an exercise in repetition and/or expert curation. (One other problem: Spiritualized fans all tend to be blokes of a certain age, which, when you realise that you must be counted as one of their number, makes the gig-going experience a bit depressing.) But shut your eyes, hunker down, and as the wall of sound – quick scribble: "Phil Spector" – breaks over you, it's hard not to succumb, such is the perfect storm of noise that the band create.

One other way to think about Spiritualized today is not as a tribute band to all those other acts, but a tribute to everything Spiritualized have ever done, as Pierce gets ever closer to that Platonic ideal of sound in his head. When he sings "I am what I am!" from a song of that title on the new album, the proper response is to be happy about that.